


Whose Definition of Normal?

by addy_is_not_a_laddy



Series: Parentalstuck [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-15
Updated: 2012-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-29 14:03:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/addy_is_not_a_laddy/pseuds/addy_is_not_a_laddy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After being flung onto Alternia, the crew decides that their best chance of creating an uprising is to raise a new generation in the teachings of the Signless.  Without much warning the group has to enact their plan and Rose gets separated from the main group with no computer and her little grub and has to raise Pavora on her own.  When having no help at all means hiding from everyone and everything and only little Pavora is the normal one on this planet Rose isn't sure how she's gonna survive.</p><p>Things get even more complicated when Rose discovers that Pavora is of the winged lineage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

Rose stared at the little creature in her arms, wondering how the fuck she had ended up in this situation.  She had, or course, inferred that trolls were different in not only their method of reproduction, but also in their development.  It was still shocking to be holding a sleeping sky blue grub in her arms anyway.  She still wasn’t quite sure how she had ended up on Alternia, but she was glad she was alive and not a grimdark at least.

  When they had been flung onto Alternia after who-knew-how long floating together in some sort of void after the scratch, Rose had welcomed the change.  When she thought about it she decided she didn’t care much for earth anyway, and after the ways that the game had changed her she welcomed the dog-eat-dog sort of world that Alternia was.  At least she didn’t have to pretend.

  The little grub squirmed in her arms, interrupting her train of thought and opening its big blue eyes to gaze up at her.  She almost began to panic before remembering why she was in this situation in the first place.  She had agreed to this.  To her own chagrin, she had agreed to doing this.  Quietly the grub made a little chirp-clicking noise at her, and she tried to think of what the other trolls and humans had been talking about before they had fled.

  The basic idea of everyone raising a grub was actually Karkat’s, with a lot of inspiration from his Ancestor’s own upbringing.  However, as no one was quite sure how to raise a grub it led to a conversation of what exactly grubs ate.  And no one remembered, so the idea everyone agreed on was to feed it little bits of stuff and hope it didn’t get sick.  After some reading, Sollux told everyone that’s basically what Lusii did too, because each grub ate different things until their first wriggling day, when they ate the same as everyone else.

  The plan had had to go through sooner than anyone had planned on because of a minor oversight.  No one realized that in only a week the new grubs would be getting lusii, so they had needed to move quickly to get the grubs and get out.  Everyone had gotten separated in the chaos of fleeing, and now Rose was alone with a grub that she knew next to nothing about how to raise.  She didn't know general troll diets, or anything.  Pretty much all she knew was a general idea of quadrants.  Rose wanted to talk to the others, to contact them, but her headband had gotten broken.  It wouldn’t work as a computer any more.  She was alone.  More alone than any of the others, she suspected, because everyone else had a way to get in contact with each other.  She regretted not taking Jade’s advice about wearing at least five computers at a time.  It had to be hard to break that many at once

  She smiled at the little grub, glad it wasn’t like a human baby.  It would never cry for food.  That was what lusii were for.  She shrugged and began with trying to feed it the greenery near their hiding space.  The first few tries yielded no result and the little grub refused to eat what she waved in front of its mouth.  Eventually, she found a plant that the creature liked and gratefully gathered it up, before considering other things she could feed it.  When is was dark Rose stayed hidden.  She knew that  mostly Trolls only moved around at night, though she couldn’t remember why.  She made  resolution to only go out during the day, even though it was bright and she could possibly more easily be seen.  The sun was hot, but not unbearable, and the grub didn’t seem to mind it much.

  The little grub had been with its sign when Rose had chosen it, as had the rest.  Apparently it made it easier for a grubs lusus to find and choose them.   She had to smile at the sign.  This little grub was a Cygnus, which although she had at first found surprising, she realized it made sense.  She noticed that of the grubs that had been taken there actually hadn’t been any of the signs that the other trolls already were. If the hemospectrum was supposedly so varied, that there were probably way more than just the twelve colours.  

  The sky blue grub in Rose’s arms got full quickly, and fell back to sleep.  She had to smile at it, because it was adorable in a distinctly non-human way.  Out of the tuft of black hair on its head two horns curved back elegantly towards the back of its head.  The segmented body was soft, but the more time Rose spent with the grub the more firm it got, and the blue only got lighter with the time the little grub spent in the sun.  Sometimes during the day as they travelled, the grub would click-chirp and refuse food, and Rose would let it walk on its little splindly black legs next to her, despite the slowness of doing so.  She didn’t know where they were headed, but as far as she could tell she was pretty far from any other sentient beings, be them troll or human.

  Sometimes, she would speak to it, and tell it fairy tales she remembered from books.  She tried not to think too hard about psychology or worrying if somehow she would become her mother and make her grub into a horrible person.  Instead she focused on the fact that she was raising essentially a child, and needed to be there for it, and to be its lusus. 

  Life was simple at first.  Of course it was simple.  Little grubs didn’t ask questions or get into trouble.  Little grubs were too young to understand that hiding or only staying awake during the day was strange.  Rose felt lonely sometimes, but the bright little face of her grub would remind her that despite being separated and alone, she would make it through somehow, and she would make this work.

 

(Image courtesy of Tsukii.  :D  Isn't pavora beautiful?)


	2. Chapter 2

Rose clutched Pavora close to her chest, and tried not to let the traitorous pounding in her chest give away her position.  It was dark, and she could hear heavy footsteps nearby, and the low rumble of the voices of the culling drones.  It was almost painful, how close they would get, before backing off.  Rose knew she could outrun them, but she would rather not have them know she was around in the first place, so she kept her silence, and Pavora wisely did as well, too scared to go back to sleep herself.  Rose prayed that te smell of the fact that she hadn't been able to find much running water lately wasn't too strong, and wrinkled her nose in disgust.

Rose knew better than to come too close to the hives of young trolls, and yet somehow they accidentally had camped near a whole city close to sunset.  Because of the quiet of the day time city, Rose hadn’t even noticed until it started getting dark and the city began to awaken.  Rode had decided she had no choice but to stay where she was with the little grub, or risk getting caught by the patrolling culling drones who were looking for weak prey in the edges of the forest.

It was about an hour before the drones that had woke them moved on, and Rose made a mental note to conceal her trail better... and get a bath... as she was getting ready to make camp with Pavora.  Rose often lit a fire to cook food, so she was lucky she had decided not to that night, and by the time the drones were gone it was nearly day again. 

As the light began to filter through the trees, Pavora made a light chirp-purring noise, and Rose glanced down at her charge.  The little creature had grown only a bit since Rose had taken her in, but Rose wasn’t too worried about it.  With the oncoming day, Rose perched the little grub in her hair and began to pack up.  Pavora was quite used to it, so she wound her legs through the locks of hair, and got a tight grip.  Since she was so small, it didn’t really bother Rose, and Rose needed both her hands to pack up her sleeping bag and forage for their breakfast.  After some trial and error Rose had come to know which plants she could and couldn’t eat, and found that all of the animals that she had come across so far were edible, although the little things that looked like squirrels really weren’t worth the trouble of killing them.

She had been searching for quite a long time for a place that was fairly uninhabited, but still good for foraging and hunting, and suddenly a quite beautiful place had appeared out of nowhere.  She had heard water, but assumed it was probably a lake, albeit a large one.  For the rest of the bright beautiful day, Rose walked up and down the beach near the sealine barefoot with little Pavora in her arms.  She would have let her walk too, if it hadn’t been so likely that the ocean would have swallowed her.

Once she determined that there was at least nobody within about a five mile radius, she set up camp near the forest’s edge behind the cover of the trees, with the beach a stone’s throw away, but far enough from the sand that the tides wouldn’t affect them, and then found a nice todepool to at least wash the worst of the grime off her body.

It was salt water, but it was better than nothing.  After weeks without the ability to bathe, Rose had stopped caring.  She had also run out of clean clothes in her sylladex to wear.  Everyone in the groups had decided that in order to make sure that they could flee at any time in case they were found, they would keep all of their belonings in their sylladexes, so Rose had everything she owned in her's.

Sitting on the edge of the tidepool, she scooped little Pavora into her arms, and brought her in for a dip.  Surprisingly, the creature suddenly wriggled free and began to swim.  She wasn't bothering to use her spindly little legs, but rather kind of moving like a snake.  It was a very strange sight from a grub that looked like a carepillar, but then, Pavora was pretty unique.  Rose's momentary panic as the grub has slipped from her fingers finally eased away, as she watched the littel grub happily swim.

After their little swim, Rose walked back to the forest, with Pavora in hand, and looked for a freshwater lake or stream to wash off the salt and to wash clothing.

\--

Pavora began to pupate after about a year and a half of living on the beach.  At first, Rose hadn’t understood what was going on when she had left for a few hours only to come back to a sky blue pupae shell as hard as stone.  She had taken the shell, and hunkered down in a nearby cave, prepared to wait it out for a long time. 

It was another year before Pavora emerged from her cocoon, and in that time Rose experienced some of the most hellish weather she could have possibly imagined.  In her cave with her grub, she was mostly safe, but the ungodly shrieking of the winds, and the insane amount of rain had been terrifying.  Rose didn’t at all understand the seasons in Alternia.  So far, it had only been nice, beautiful, and sunny.  And yet, somehow, the weather had turned ghastly literally overnight and remained that way for months.  Rose had had to take every opportunity between massive storms to try and hoard food in the cave so she wouldn’t starve before the next storm ended.

It was shortly after this hell had ended that Rose began to notice the softening of the cocoon, and kept a closer eye on it, and began to stock up on some of the food she knew Pavora liked as well as her own food.  When the time actually came for Pavora to emerge, it was at night, and Rose had been sleeping, curled around the enlarged cocoon protectively.  She felt it rocking in her arms, and awoke immediately, as she felt the cocoon bulge a bit, and a small hand began to push it way out of a split in the skin of it.

Suddenly Pavora had a body more resembling a human than a caterpillar, and her face was less round and babyish, and her lightly curly hair had grown down to her hips.  She looked like a nearly five-year-old, and it astounded Rose that she had changed so much in only a year.  Also, her eyes were no longer bright blue, taking on the orange-and-black of a prepubescent troll.  It made Rose sad that she didn’t have he big blue eyes any more, but she was still beautiful.  And even her horns had done a fair amount of growing, sweeping back elegantly from her face towards her back.

Rose was about to hug the little girl when she smelled the freshly-emerged-stink.  And it stank, horribly.  So, ignoring her usual caution, she dragged the little girl who remained silent to the ocean, and helped wash her up and down, and buried the remains of the cocoon.  As she was walking the little girl back to their cave, she heard a small voice.

“Hellllo?”

It sounded like a child, but Rose froze in fear, nonetheless.  She looked back slowly, and Pavora had already looked back, completely unashamed of her nudity.  There on the shore stood a wet and finned little boy, wearing a black shirt with a sign of some strange shade of purple on it that Rose didn’t recognize.  The little boy didn’t at all look angry or scared, just hopeful.

“Sorry, if I scared you.  I’mmm… I’mmm Mmmoaten.  I hadn’t seen another trollllll around since mmmy wriggling day, half a sweep ago!  My lllusus doesn’t talk mmmuch, so it’s been lonely.”  The boy’s voice held some consonants longer than necessary, but Rose ignored it as a trait similar to one she had noticed in Eridan.  The small troll was looking at Pavora, and not her, but Rose answered reguardless, feeling that somehow trusting this boy was alright.  He was young anyway, and if he turned on her, well, children died on Alternia all the time.  Rose's stomach only flipped a few times at the idea of killing a child.  She had done worse.

“This is Pavora, and she’s only just had her first wriggling day.  She emerged from her cocoon not long ago, and I need to get her back to the hive to get her dressed.”

The little troll turned and gawked at her, seemingly seeing her for the first time.  “You’re an odd lllusus!” he proclaimed, and Rose tried to smile disarmingly.

“There are lots of types of lusus, right?  Because there are so many types of blood in trolls.  So I’m the special lusus for Pavora here.  She’s a Cygnus, with sky blue blood, and when we get back to the hive she’s going to wear her sign proudly.”

The small troll blinked up at her, seemingly in awe.  Thankfully, Rose was wearing all white, and with her hair being the same colour she actually did look a bit like a lusus.  Even with living on the beach, she had no tan because she had been in the cave for months avoiding the wrath of the weather.

She spoke to Moaten only a little longer, before insisting that because the sun was coming up she needed to get Pavora back to the hive.  By the time they reached the cave, she began to stare at Pavora in earnest.  Pavora had not uttered a single sound since emerging, but Rose was determined to change that.

She pulled out some fabric from her sylladex, which she had put in her pack after stealing it shortly after she had taken over to take care of Pavora.  She had noticed that every troll wore a black shirt with their symbol colour emblazoned on their chest, but she hadn’t known how big Pavora would be when she emerged, so she had to make a shirt for her still.  However, she had made a loose skirt that was perfect on Pavora, so after putting it on the little girl she got to work on the shirt. 

Pavora sat quietly for nearly an hour before Rose decided to put down her sewing and talk to her.  She opened her arms, and the little troll clambered into them happily, a smile on her face.  Absently, Rose began to run her fingers through Pavora's hair, just happy to have a daughter, even if it was through some pretty strange circumstances.  At the famailiar and comfortable feeling, Pavora closed her eyes and began to chirp-purr.  Well, talking could wait a little longer, she supposed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I don't have a BETA, so after feeling the unbearable urge to post, I waited a day and have done so. I am bad at catching my own spelling mistakes and the like, so apologies if there are mistakes. I hope you like it, because I still on't know if I do or not. To me though, it seems like this fic by itself will probably be a relatively short one. Perhaps seven to ten chapters... maybe. And then a companion piece that may only be a one-shot from the main group's POV, and THEN a sequel to those two things.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't promise a post very often, but I will post if you bug me. It's not that writing chapters takes very long or is hard, it's just that I don't remember to write for them.


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